WITH THE SUPPORT OF
Agustín Coppel, Peter Kilchmann and the Government of the State of San Luis Potosí

Red Square Impossible Pink is an exploration on the frame as the aesthetic and political limit of representation in art. In Melanie Smith’s work the pictorial question on the frame as a limit has driven large part of her artistic research. By questioning the aesthetic and artistic practices of modernity — particularly the relationship between abstraction and utopia in Suprematism — this project works on the displacements and variations this utopia has produced in Latin American geoesthetical emplacements. Thus, Smith tackles the issue of the transformation of utopias as artistic projections into heterotopias as productions of social and political experience in Latin America.

The exhibition is articulated through three video works coauthored by Rafael Ortega, a series of paintings and an installation. The video works develop the notion of emplacement as a dialectical play between ruins and chaos, an operation in which paintings and installations function as spectral interventions between the Palazzo Rota Ivancich and the video pieces. Delirium, compulsion and melancholy are the three affects that Melanie Smith explores in these works.

With this participation, the presence of the Mexican Pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia is consolidated in the dialogue established by the current art produced in Mexico with contemporary artistic practices. This is the third time the Mexican Pavilion is uninterruptedly presented, with previous participations by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in 2007 (curated by Príamo Lozada † and Bárbara Perea) and Teresa Margolles in 2009 (curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina).José Luis Barrios – Curator

“] Bulto (secuencia) 2011 Melanie Smith / Rafael Ortega Video HDV 2 min 57 seg Colección MALI, Lima y La Colección Jumex, México Cortesía de los artistas y Peter Kilchmann Galerie Copyright Melanie Smith / Rafael Ortega"BiographyMelanie Smith was born in Poole, England in 1965. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Reading. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Mexico City, an experience that has enormously influenced her work ever since. Her work has been characterized by a certain re-reading of the formal and aesthetic categories of avant-gardes and post-avant-garde movements, problematized at the sites and within the horizons of heterotopias. Her production is intimately related to a certain expanded vision of the notion of modernity, maintaining a relationship both with what this means in Latin America, particularly in Mexico, and with the implication this has for her formal explorations as a critical moment in the aesthetic-political structure of modernity and late modernity.

Her earlier pieces considered Mexico City itself, recording its multitudes, its violence, its banality, and its clandestine nature and at the same time its inherent decomposition. The most outstanding piece from this cycle is the video Spiral City (2002). In another of her works, she broadens the notions of place and non-place by documenting the small town of Parres on the outskirts of the city. She produced a trilogy of 35mm films and a series of paintings and installations that rework the modernist idea of the monochromatic. Melanie Smith is represented by Peter Kilchmann gallery and Nara Roesler gallery.